Gender, Society, and Change: The Emergence of Proto-Feminist Discourse in Early Victorian Literature
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17605/cajssh.v7i1.1265Keywords:
Proto-feminism, Early Victorian Literature, Gender Norms, Female Agency, Patriarchy, Women Writers, Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, Feminist Consciousness, Victorian SocietyAbstract
This post considers the rise of proto-feminist protest in Early Victorian literature of the period 1830-1860, a time when strict class structures and a rigid patriarchal society repressed women’s legal, social and educational opportunities. However, on a more subtle level the study considers how the female authors subtly subverted dominant gender ideologies through narrative techniqiesm characterization and thematic concerns, concentrating primarily on Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte and The Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot. Building on qualitative, comparative and historical-contextual analysis the study pinpoints prominent proto-feminist ideas as women's agency, moral independence, education and refusal to accept an imposed position of "housewife. The discovery that early Victorian women authors mapped and critiqued patriarchal power relations in their novels by depicting characters of sufficient complexity to subvert oppressive cultural expectations for female self-definition and autonomy. Situated in their sociocultural milieu, these literary works function on one level to signal literature’s as a precursor form in a challenge to traditional gender expectations prior to the organisation of feminist campaigns. The article is innovative in Victorian scholarship and gender criticism by treating an under-represented moment in feminist consciousness, and establishing the beginnings of ideas that inspired subsequent feminist literary practices.
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